Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi

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Reviewed by: Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi Ellen Mayock Delgado, Luisa Elena, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2016. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-08-2652-086-9. The turn to the study of emotions and affect is most welcome, as it demands multi- and interdisciplinary approaches and, in many cases, questions the cynicism so rife in the postmodern era. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History therefore arrives at a propitious moment in Spanish literary, film, and cultural studies and serves as an outstanding study on "the history and critical interpretation of the emotions in relation to modern Spain, considering their evolution and their social and cultural significance from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present" (1). Several of the essays place Spain in the broader context of Latin America and Europe, thus moving the notion of "Spanish" beyond Spain's national and/or geographic boundaries. [End Page 186] The volume consists of an introduction by the co-editors and fifteen individually authored essays. Because the editors want "to stress that emotions are historically conditioned" (6), the essays are organized in chronological order according to the year(s) of production of the works examined. The introduction defines the contours of the study of emotions, establishes key terms (e.g. "emotion"; "affect"; "sensation"; "feeling"; and "thought" [5-6]) and demonstrates nuances of meaning from language to language, provides a theoretical framework, and summarizes the main themes of the book. These main themes include the sense-emotion continuum (body-mind); the performative nature of emotion; the emotional connections between writers and readers; the race and gender implications in the expression of emotion; the role of emotion in the construction of self; historical memory; and the tension in politics between and among reason, passion, and empathy. While the introduction makes for an excellent primer on the understanding of sense and sensibility in Spanish cultural texts, the body of the volume could easily serve as the basis of an advanced seminar on eighteenth through twenty-first century Spanish cultural studies. Mónica Bolufer treats texts as diverse as sentimental literature, political and legal reports, and memoirs to examine how language "at once managerial and exploratory" navigates sensibility and emotion (Plamper cited on p. 24). The volume moves to the early nineteenth century with Wadda C. Ríos-Font's essay, "'How Do I Love Thee'. The Rhetoric of Patriotic Love in Puerto Rican Discourse," in which the author underscores the linguistic freight of patriotism and its link to emotion and empathy. Pura Fernández writes a compelling analysis of Agustín Pérez Zaragoza's 1831 Galería fúnebre, emphasizing the play between public and private, introspection and extroversion, through Weber's notion of the "emotional community." In her well-documented essay, Rebecca Haidt writes about "emotional contagion" in the medical context of nineteenth-century Spain, looking specifically at the elements of sympathy and humanity in the parsing of hygiene directives of the era. Lou Charnon-Deutsch's essay shines in its ability to connect nineteenth-century Spanish politics to twenty-first-century world politics, employing Sara Ahmed's theory of hatred in the contact between bodies (95) to examine the representation of Jews, Freemasons, and Jesuits in various legal documents. Rafael Huertas picks up the medical thread of the volume as he studies the representation of emotion in asylum texts from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In her magisterial essay on "cinematic experience in 1920s Spain," Juli Highfill compares potential cinematic experiences in a poem (Pedro Salinas), a short story (Francisco Ayala), and a film (Elías Riquelme). No expansive volume would be complete without a section on the Spanish Civil War, and Engaging Emotions does not disappoint. Javier Krauel's essay looks at the influence of emotions and liberal institutions in the press during the Second Republic and makes viable comparisons between Marxist and Falange rhetoric. Maite Zubiaurre transports the reader a few years into the future by investigating how female frigidity and erotic emotion are mapped in...